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College Measures

Center

Improving higher education outcomes in the United States

College Measures works with state governments to help identify higher education credentials with high return on investment. Our work focuses on the hot jobs that present the best opportunities for students to launch exciting careers and on the hot skills that students need to get those jobs. Our goal is to help students find programs that lead to success in the labor market and will allow them to lead the lives they want.

College Measures has a commitment to improving higher education in the United States, and operates under the belief that data is underexposed and underused by students, parents, policymakers, and even by institutions themselves. Our goal is to make data useful, usable—and used—in order to help increase student success.

Launch My Career

A series of state-specific websites (Colorado, Tennessee, and Texas), Launch My Career is grounded in work conducted by AIR and offers students a new way to plan for life after high school. The sites, developed by College Measures, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, and Gallup Inc., feature interactives that show the potential return on investment for a wide array of higher education choices.

College Measures in the News

In Minnesota, majors matter. A new report conducted for the Minnesota Office of Higher Education by College Measures, a division of AIR, examines the salaries by major of graduates up to four years after they get degrees or certificates from Minnesota public colleges and universities and finds that choice of major has a far more dramatic impact on what students earn after graduation than where they go to college.

Is a college degree still a good investment even though tuition and student debt have skyrocketed? In general, the answer remains “yes,” but the adage that you “earn what you learn” comes with caveats, according to a new AIR study of short- and longer-term wages of four-year and community college graduates in Virginia.

A series of state-specific websites, grounded in work conducted by AIR, will offer students a new way to plan for life after high school. Its interactive features show the potential return on investment for a wide array of higher education choices. The “Launch My Career” website will help students identify in-demand jobs across Colorado and in particular regions of the state, and will help students identify majors, as well as degree or certificate programs, that will help prepare them for those jobs.

Dr. Mark Schneider, President of College Measures and a Vice President at the American Institutes for Research (AIR), testified May 6, 2015 before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) on the need to make consumer information more readily available for those pursuing a postsecondary education, including associate’s degrees and certificates.

The number of subbaccalaureate credentials granted in Colorado is rapidly growing with some graduates earning as much as, or even more than, those with bachelor’s degrees. These findings are from a new analysis looking at 10 years of data on graduates of all public and many private institutions in Colorado who work in the state.